RECIPES!

Become a Fan

27 October 2010

no sleep. well, no deep sleep. few dreams. mostly passing out. trying not to fall asleep on the commute home.

never time to eat. never have time to sit and eat. no utensils to eat with. no plates, just plastic containers. on the fly. on the run. a taste here and a swallow of something substantial almost never. disparate food groups go into the mouth at odd times of the day. example:

6 am: salt cod brandade. 6:04 am: vanilla ice cream base. 6:30 am: just blanched leeks. 7 am: a carrot's stem end. 7:32 am: hot chocolate chip cookie. burn tongue. 9 am: overcooked scrambled eggs, cold {?staff meal}. 7 pm: [yes, that's right---> you eat nothing from 9 am until 7 pm.] a few cilantro leaves and a stolen celery heart. 8:19 pm: one spoon of searingly hot soup. burn tongue again. 10:16 pm: four and a half bites of cold rice, cold mystery meat, soggy limp salad. {yes, another staff meal taken in a deli cup but not eaten when hot.} 2 am: you get home and realize you have nothing to eat in the house but you're starving so you eat crackers or instant ramen or have a beer or go to sleep hungry.

lonely. spend your days nagging cooks. harp on every last detail of everyone's work. fix the dishwasher on a Saturday night. stay until 5 am pulling apart the ceiling to find a leak. bake all night because one of your bakers is out sick. yell at people for being lazy and get disrespected in evry which way but the eighth day of the week. work the craziest fucking hours anyone sane or even insane enough to hang out with, would. try your luck on the desperate alcoholics at the bar, and everyone is wondering what the mangey dog brought in. go home to a dirty apartment and sit in the dark but for the glow of secret internet meanderings. being a boss means everyone wants to be you, but few want to be with you. and you don't have the time, even if they did. most of your [old] friends have 'normal' 'civilian' lives. and if they don't eat where you work, you never see them either.

nerdy. and not in the ironic sense. your entire life revolves around the kitchen. insular. your humour, your manner, your thoughts, your viewpoints, all revolve around your kitchen, your crew, your menu, your food, your next menu, your bar sales, your craft, your purveyors, your wine rep, your tableware, your shortcomings, your youness as it relates to you. you're so self referential to your own square footage you can barely remember when you thought about anything else. people might meet you out and exclaim, "O! YOU'RE A CHEF?! R E A L L YYYY?!!! WOW. THAT'S SOOOO COOL! What a cool job!!!" And you wish you'd never said anything at all because now, on your one night off in 6 weeks, you could have heard something other than what usually comes out of your mouth, you hear yourself leave your body and talk about your kitchen, your food, your menu, your press, your staff, your you you you and more you, and even though you are watching yourself kill this innocent little Top Chef watching devotee with the real deal, the real chef's life, the real hours, the real scars, the real fucking deal, yo, from the other side of the room, or worse yet, from the ceiling like a Greek God, you can't help it. it all spills out. you talk about the seeds your favorite farmer collects and the whole lamb you broke down this afternoon and the cook you had to send to the hospital before service because he took off the side of his pinky on a mandolin. YOU CAN'T STOP TALKING ABOUT YOUR OWN LITTLE WORLD. even though now even the out-of-body you is yawning with minutae obsessed nerdiness and morbid cook humor no one but you and your world gets, you kill, you kill dead the person who could have talked TO you about something else. something, anyfuckingthing that might have actually given you THE NIGHT OFF. yeah, that one you're not gonna see until February. It's November.

bad friend. bad father. bad uncle. bad girlfriend. bad son. bad community lover. bad husband. bad mother. bad dog owner. bad roommate. bad citizen. have you ever dated a chef? we fucking suck. we're tired all the time. we stink. we never write, we never call, we never go to weddings or funerals or births. we don't have days off and we don't dare try and take them. we don't go to the doctor when we're sick. we don't take the best care of ourselves. we pay our bills late and we have trouble keeping up with our laundry. we do not respond to jury duty notices. we never see the light of day and we like to sleep on any days off we weasel out of our kitchens. we think and talk kitchen food staffing issues lists menus produce protein production ceaselessly. we don't show up on time. we don't know how to eat with utensils. we don't get holidays off, we work them, so don't ask. we're defensive, on edge, drunk a lot of the time, and we flirt with waiters. it's as bad as a dog liking a cat, but we do it. we cheat on our partners and we don't get home in time to tuck our kids in. we don't answer emails and we don't write full sentences if we manage to write at all. we don't answer the phone and if we call we wake you up because in our world the clock stops when we enter our little kitchen world. years can go by and we have no idea what's happening in the world outside our world. we are like jailed narcissists. mirrors on all sides.

sticky, stinky, bruised and burned. you often look like garbage the bridge and tunnel tourists of your town leave in your gutters as they make their way back to their pristine suburban fake lives. people avoid you walking down the street even if they've begged your host to let them eat your food just minutes before. you've been wearing the same clothes for the last 17 hours and you smell of smoke, blood, oil and onions. you get home to find chocolate and beet juice on your forehead and you wonder why no one thought to tell you to wipe it off while they cooked alongside you for the last 15 hours. your scars tell their own bar stool stories. you caught the biggest fish, fucked the prettiest girl and reached into the oven a hundred times that night with a wet towel because the kitchen ran out of linens in the middle of service. you're burned and bloody and barely patched with band aids that aren't built for hard labor.

21 August 2010

you see an ad on Craigslist. it says, Line Cooks Needed for Busy Uptown Restaurant. or Pastry Chef Wanted for Three Star Resort. or ___________ [your favorite restaurant here] Needs _________ [exactly what you're qualified as.] you promptly send in a resume. then you...

what?

what do you do next? when do you change your outgoing message on your cell phone to sound professional? when do you get your clothes pressed? when do you start doing research on the chef/pastry chef/restaurant/company you're about to interview with? when do you start asking around about that chef/pastry chef/restaurant/company to see what your peers say? when do you change your email address from sexkitten69@isuckhard.com to namemyparntscallme@notaol.com? when do you research what restaurants are paying for that position in that city? when do you work on your negotiating skills? when do you take out a calculator and do the math? on a piece of paper?

when do you do YOUR fucking homework?

because, you know what?

if YOU don't do YOUR homework, why should I hire you? why are you wasting my time? I have to do MY homework. I can't sit on my ass waiting for my education to come to me. if you don't do your homework, you look and sound like an asshole. you are a shoemaker even before you cut your fingertips off or walk into someone carrying a pot of hot stock or get asked to leave the kitchen/restaurant/your station in the middle of service. if you don't do your homework, what the fuck are you doing between the time of sending your resume and sitting down in front of the chef for the interview? what are you thinking? how are you preparing?

do me a favor? do all chefs everywhere a favor?

learn how to interview. learn this before you learn how to tie an apron and hold a ladle. learn how to negotiate your rate of pay. learn how to type into Google, "Paul Canales," or "Rachel Leising" or "Dan Lepard"+London. this is how you learn about the people you're about to meet. know a little something about what they cook/stand for. think HARD about if that's the kind of kitchen you want to work in.* especially if their name is in the Craigslist ad, you really have no excuse.

if you want to do extra curricular homework, check out ChefDB.com this is an incredible resource, especially if you want to see who worked where when and with whom. in fact, while I'm speaking on it, feel free to put your name within ChefDB {DB stands for Database} because then I can find you. what's great about ChefDB.com is that when sending a resume electronically, you can merely say, "for the rest of my resume see it online at ChefDB.com" and link to it. it's so easy. do it now. stop fucking around on Twitter and do something for your career.

you do NOT need to go to culinary school to get a job cooking/baking professionally. you can follow these instructions and get just as far, and possibly farther. and you won't be burdened trying to pay off a private loan with a minimum wage job.

it's important to look at your resume before you hit send. are there spelling errors? are you applying for a cook position and it says on your resume that you are already a chef?

if you have absolutely no relevant cooking experience on your resume, say why you're applying for a baker/cook position. if you send a resume from another career, I, like other chefs, erase it because we don't know why, if you're a lawyer or an advertising exec or a professor of biology, you're applying for a prep or chef de cuisine or a butcher job.

*on the subject of thinking about if you really want to work for/with chef/pastry chef/restaurant/company you're about to interview with, you may want to think about your trajectory. you may want to ask for feedback about your resume-- about the path your on, from a chef who's been cooking twice or three times as long as you have.

the reasons for this are too many to describe here, but your career is a series of steps you take to reach a goal. or goals.

I've seen a lot of resumes (at least 6 dozen) in the past few weeks, and some resumes are so haphazard I just want to ask, "Why?" I realize that the economy only worsens matters what with lay-offs and restaurants closing left and right. but think about your path. because you should have one.

I didn't "have a path" initially, but I was given some great advice at the very beginning,

and I listened to it.

and I'm glad I did, because, even without a culinary school degree I've seen and cooked and baked inside of most of my favorite restaurants and for/with amazingly talented chefs & pastry chefs.

I am always honest in my interviews. but I don't disparage any chefs/restaurants I've worked for before. I give notice professionally and finish as strong as chefs/owners will allow me the opportunity. I do my math/salary/chef/owner/company homework and when I show up for interviews I secretly "interview" all the staff I come into contact with. I sit at the bar and ask the bartenders how long they've worked there. I talk to waiters and ask if the restaurant is busy. I have questions ready for the owners/chef and I present my strengths and weaknesses honestly. I know myself and I only apply for jobs I want, and want to dedicate myself to, and want to stay at.

because we don't just sit down and talk-interview for professional cooking jobs. because we also "trail" for said positions. it's utterly important that you do not bullshit or lie on your resume or in your interview. chefs, like cops and lawyers and the mob, have channels. we talk. we kibbutz. quietly. we cohort, and we 'ask around' after a person. YOU can do the same thing. find out about the not-so-public persona of the chef/pastry chef/restaurant/company you're about to interview with. go to the restaurant under cover and even if you can't afford to eat there, watch the dining room at 8 pm on a Saturday night.

because we "trail" or 'present a tasting' before we get the job, it's important that you don't bullshit during the interview. because kitchens are X-Rays. especially we the insane pastry chefs. we will see through you.

if we're paying attention.

and if we're not paying attention to the fact that you know nothing and were too lazy to do your homework and did nothing besides hit send on a machine to get a job

09 August 2010

wake up every morning at 7 am regardless of how late/early you went to bed wake up shaky even though you haven't touched caffeine in weeks forget to eat until dinner time don't know what day, date, season it is forget what you forgot start erasing more emails than you read, write or answer put together start paying someone to do your laundry think that the morning of today happened during a different week interview and offer jobs in the same hour make prep lists the size of your first knitted scarf you couldn't figure out how to bind off on stop seeing your bank account drop in funds
start emptying your home fridge into the trash stop buying food for your house stop answering personal calls stop getting personal calls discontinue to commute/walk/ride anywhere that's not in your restaurant's vicinity stop knowing what's happening in the world/your city forget what 'news' is forget what daytime looks like stop eating meals and begin eating tests forget that you own, or have ever worn, any other clothes but your whites start looking at 'normal' people like they're zoo animals realize normal people are looking at you funny don't notice people looking at anything
don't notice anything

14 June 2010

The world is your oyster. Right now. As spring turns into summer. Before the holidays and after late winter's lull.

Restaurants have seasons they like to open in. They follow the moon, in a crazy sort of way.

And right now, the moon is very full, pregnant, in fact, with imminent births.

If you want to cook New York City, may I suggest you check in with Craigslist today? Whether it be in San Francisco, somewhere in the delicious deep South, or right here in the Big Apple, a city for which sleep is not needed, you might see a posting you want to answer.

New York is your oyster. Whether you swallow or chew, spurn or hoard, relish or retch, eat traif or not, come and get it while the gettin' is good.

03 June 2010

I haven't disappeared.but maybe I have.it depends on how you look at it.many people will tell you I'm more present than ever.many of these last days have not been spent in the kitchen.but soon that's the only place I'll be.

These days I'm shaking hands with a lot of guys who sell big machines.They say things to me like, "Why are you being so fucking polite?! We don't trust you if you're too nice..." {Not gonna lie-- It's a strange acclamation to go from London to NYC.}

Excel has become a great friend of mine.

I've built a database in fact.One wouldn't think a pastry chef could do such a thing.The database does all sorts of mathematical tricks.And all the pages talk to each other. VLOOKUP and Dropdown Menus, yo.So few restaurants, and less chefs {who are not hotel/corporate trained, which I am not} understand the power of internal, back-end organization.The Excel document is a list of all raw product, a compilation of recipes, a break down of all product to show price per gram, a relay of price per gram embedded in each recipe to cost out each recipe, and, as we move through costing out each product, we can add these "working products" to our "list of ingredients."So if you want to know the cost of butterscotch ice cream you take the cost of ice cream as a recipe and add to it the cost of butterscotch, a working product, by the gram amount you need.

If this sounds too nerdy for you, or if this doesn't sound like cheffing as you know it, think about it this way: for every skill you add to your resume you become that much more valuable, can garner a higher wage and you might even be able to keep your job when the economy tanks.

This is the second restaurant database I've written, and if we all use it to its potential it will also help us with inventory, ordering, wholesale/catering, and price tracking.

Or think about it this way: It's easier to work in your business than on it.

What else am I doing? Test baking,measuring my station and the equipment I've ordered,having lots and lots and lots of menu meetings,talking to future staff about the possibility of working with me, with us, visiting the future home of the restaurant in all its stages: raw, midrare etc. {we are going to inhabit a building that basically needed to be gutted & rebuilt from the inside-out},tracking down an ice cream machine,attempting to navigate the farmers market and taking notes on which farmers have what produce during which weeks/months/seasons,organizing recipes & recipe notes,finding hard to find product through available purveyors and looking under rocks for the rest,going on field trips to places I won't be able to once we open the doors to the public,and spending as much time with my family and friends as I and they can and have time for.

"There's a lot of 'hurry up and wait.' You have all this time to organize yourself, your time and the project. But you wait. A lot. And then when the restaurant is going to open any minute you have a thousand things to do and no time to do them!"

I know you want to know more about the project. Where it is, who its with, what my menu will be like, when we'll open. I promise you'll know, as soon as I can tell.

19 November 2009

It is with much sadness we are writing to tell everyone who have
supported Eloise in the past sixteen months that we have decided to
close the restaurant as of Monday, November 30th. We
will continue with normal service through Sunday, November 29th and
would love a chance to say goodbye to any of you who would like to come
in before then. We thank each of you for your patronage,
enthusiasm and encouragement. We have loved serving you and look
forward to a time when we may meet again.

Fondly, Eric, Ginevra and the entire Eloise Staff

-------

I cannot begin to express how sad this note makes me. While mega-chef empires grow, the independently-owned restaurants struggle, and many of them are folding.

I have no doubt Eric & Ginevra will be welcomed, appreciated and encouraged to thrive wherever they unfold their knife bags next, but it does not take away the overwhelming sense of discouragement I imagine they feel now.

If you live in Northern California I beg of you to eat the food these two wonderful chefs grow and cook before November 29th.

17 June 2008

There's someone in your family who has a problem. Gambling. Drugs. Alcohol. Sex.It could be any or all of the above. Every family has a secret problem person. And sometimes they're not a secret. You hate this person. And you love them. And sometimes you feel both things and they are so intertwined you don't even know you're in a forest among trees. But their addiction maddens you. Frustrates, annoys, tortures. You think,"This aunt of mine is so smart. My brother has everything, what is he doing wasting it all? Why can't my mother get her act together? I hate that we have to move every time my father loses all his money from ______. I wish we weren't going to that cousin's house for Thanksgiving, I get so embarrassed when she gets wasted, she's too old to act like that!"

Addiction is a powerful force. Humans are its hosts, and it will stop at nothing to separate you from what and whom you love, as it kills you slowly.

Passion can feel like addiction. Passion, obsession, addiction; they are all closely related although slightly dissimilar.

Some passions can feel like obsessions or addictions because the drive that is within us to pursue our passions stays in our line of vision when red flags are popping up on all sides. Being a visionary, a dreamer, a doer, an entrepreneur, means forging on even when practicalities outweigh the validity of the mirage.

A friend once told me that people who open businesses have to be good business people, of course, to make it stand and walk and live; but moreover they have to have a larger dose of dreamer in them to get such an idea off the ground before wings are formed. A dreamer trusts in something else, some other, deeper part of themselves. A dreamer is a survivor in that she/he knows picking up a broken self and starting all over again might be in the cards.

One has to be prepared for loss when one dreams.Turning dreams into matter could also be compared to having a child.

It never ceases to amaze me how women I know who have become pregnant, and had children, swear they will be the same person after childbirth. But there is always a transformation. And it seems so obvious after the fact, that they never mention it again. A major calamity, an act bringing on extreme grief, will create transformation as well, but since birth gives and grief takes away, the grieving person has little outward proof of their reason for change.

All these metaphors are related to chefs who open their own restaurants.

Back to addiction. It's possible that no one in your immediate life has had a struggle with addiction. Although I would find it implausible, especially if you grew up in urban America, as I did. In my own family many people have lived with and through imperiling addictions. Joyous for me, many of those family members have found 12 Step programs and become sober.

But hoping beyond hope, praying every moment of the day for someone's sobriety is a tricky thing.

We think that if said person stops drinking, or buying white powder, or sneaking off with the rent check to basement card games, everything will be normal again. Groovy and just so and perfect and happy.

But what we don't know, right up until that very last drink or prostitute or wager or glassine envelope, is that said person is someone completely unknown to us. That said person without a substance is no person without a reason to live. And we, the other humans in the room, are not reason enough to bring said person back from the edge of the grave or sanity or wherever their self esteem found its last refuge. Person in question can not and will not give up their drug of choice just because we want them to.

The person in our life who can abstain, and therefore halt the deadliest physical side affects of addiction, and replace that black hole with something unrelated to the mortal world, is a stranger, until we take the time to meet them again.

This might seem like a very dark example for the subject at hand, but in my world everything is like a language that is connected by ideas, if not a visually familiar alphabet.

I have maintained in my posts about Opening A Restaurant here on Eggbeater, restaurants are like children, or babies, which non-traditional families make. Non-traditional in that there are usually far more people involved in opening a restaurant than there are needed to have sex and conceive a human child.

We have that spark, it makes us giddy and sleepless, happiness reaches critical mass and we are delirious with ideas and hopes and dreams, we pray there's someone whose feet are planted on the ground who likes math and understands percentages, sometimes we get cravings and/or morning sickness, and pretty soon we are truly sleepless because the restaurant is all mouths and stomach and #2 and there's never enough time or food or energy to satiate the helpless beast infant.

The baby metaphor is like the sober alcoholic family member. See?

Because the chef who is now the owner wanted more than anything to open a restaurant. That was their "Story." Their only story.

I Am Chef. Must Open Restaurant. To Prove I Am Real Chef. Must Have Proof. Restaurant. Must Be Mine.

But didn't know that once restaurant was fed 24 hours a day and
bathed and diapers were changed ad nauseum and tiny nails were clipped and doors
were left open so that even the tiniest whisper of a cry could be
answered immediately, the restaurant turns into someone something else.

Restaurants are run by people, by many many many egos. Even if it is The Chef's Baby.

And something odd happens to the chef whose restaurant is turning into an opinionated child in front of them. The chef must mourn the loss of their dream. Or part of it, at least.

The same way you want your best friend to get sober but when she does she's not the same person anymore and if you want to stay in her life you have to give her a lot of rope, time, patience and empathy, and then you have to re-introduce yourselves. And you might even have to go to therapy or a 12 Step meeting, or 20, to understand your part. It's usually more than you bargained for when all you thought you wanted was for that person to give up the thing which seemed to be making them into a monster.

For better and for worse, and all that murky grey stuff in between, The Restaurant becomes someone you don't recognize and you have to go with the flow, or be left in the dust. And a Restaurant without a leader is a lost soul. Whether there's coup or a closure, restaurants require herding, a forceful, directed lasso and guidance, by someone, into helping them become whomever they are becoming.

Life is a wild and woolly ride. If life is a verb for you, that is. If your passions take hold and don't let go until dreams are conceived and born and let loose to run amok, and create terror and delicious food and and, and, and and and.

Perhaps those of us who know, only work as cogs in massive dream machines. Perhaps those who dream must be brought down to earth every once and while to have a drink with the pragmatists to sober up and see some leaves on some branches and maybe even a tree or two.

I know this. For every hope there is a process and the need for an application of hard internal, as well as the obvious, external work. If you are a chef owner who thinks there is no transformation, whether necessary or possible or inevitable, when leaping over the wall from cook to owner, you have a nest full of chicks in eggs who will hatch wing-less. In an argument about nature vs. nurture you must understand that the restaurant, who it will become with and without your care and presence, is not an either/or situation.

As is with the case of the person whom you love very much, who has just barely escaped a walking or actual death, a re-configuration of your hopes must be assessed and put in order.

For while there is time to stand back and be puzzled and frustrated, and become silent and incommunicative, and feel betrayed that Your Baby is not who you want or think it should be, you do not have all the time in the world, for it will become an anarchistic star, burning out on its own from lack of structure and acceptance. Like a Rock Star.

If you are the chef and the owner, it is your job, and no one else's, to take responsibility for your restaurant's success.And this takes rolling up your sleeves for hard internal work. For the cogs may be able to help you, and give you a portal from which to travel to the Ray Bradbury moon where you can watch your unconscious play leading role in Greek tragedy after Greek tragedy, but they cannot stop the momentum of your actions, or inactions, as they pertain to The Restaurant Baby you have given birth to. For the cogs will come and go, no matter how much they care in the moment.

And if you resist? If you resist transformation, or the knowledge of transformation, or change, or that X-ray vision or anything else that comes along with a life changing experience, I have only one question.

14 April 2008

You don't me. I've never met you but we wear the same uniform in the kitchen. We have the same attitude. All four of our hands are scarred. You have oil burns and I have caramel scars. Neither one of us has seen real sunshine in 10 years. Both our paychecks suck., although there's a good chance that mine sucks worse than yours.

You probably don't like eating dessert, but I do. You think creme brulee and molten chocolate cake are fantastic, and maybe even tiramisu. I think blanching tripe is icky and I cringe at the thought of butchering live lobsters. You might have trouble following a recipe involving grams. I get off on order and cleanliness and you think I'm crazy.

Sometimes we are similar, but more of the time we are quite different.

You would like me to come and accent your salty food with a little something sweet.

The problem is that I don't sleep in your kitchen if I'm consulting. Your house has a guest room and it's where I wash up, but I don't stay overnight. This means that, because you pay the mortgage and I just bring the odd green bean casserole and bundt cake, it is your job to taste everything I make all the time, because I am not there to serve it. This is where it's difficult.

It is at this juncture that I release my children into your hands. We have to trust each other, we have to respect each other, and it would help if we each knew something about each others methods-- not super specifically like your secrets and palate, but if you don't know how to reach nappe and I don't know how to saute scallops to tender perfection, we are in a relationship headed towards disaster.

those red flags are not waving you in.

How do we create and sustain this tenuous relationship? How do I stand in front of the school and watch my children run to school where I am not with them, garnishing and paying close attention to their crumb and texture? How do you communicate with me when it appears as though we speak another language.

Anthony Bourdain says in Kitchen Confidential pastry chefs are the neurologists of the kitchen.

How do we navigate this rocky terrain for which there are no maps? Each consulting gig is it's own thing, no two alike. I'm like a traveling circus performer. Bend this way or that, apply make up for smile or frown, juggle eggs or play with fruit, create fancifulness or down home heart warming goodnesses.

Be who I can't be. Be who I don't want to be. Be making things I don't want to eat.

It's all right, I can be your stuntman.

I'm no line cook anymore. I like sugar and alchemy. I'm macho too, but in a different way.

Another pastry chef recently contacted me. She wanted to know what consulting is like, how much does it pay and how do you let people know you exist. A different person wrote to me, a savoury chef-- she said that she didn't think she could consult-- to have someone else in charge of her food-- she could not imagine letting go of it in that way. Two months ago a close friend of mine said it seemed to him that I was really good about talking about my feelings, better than most.

What do I say to all of this? Nothing is easy. I make it look easy? You're not inside my head, my heart. I am not my recipes. And if I give someone a folder of lists of ingredients, amounts and times & temperatures, they cannot be me. Who takes care of a pot de creme like me? Who watches those custards like they were newborn babies, who listens to their every breath like me? No one.

I thought I could leave my heart at the doorjam if I was a consultant.

Ha.

At the end of this week I make a transition: I am done with one kitchen and I start to support another. In between I go where the bagels are real but the face features and lawns are not.

It's all a process, yo. You want advice from me in this area? Sorry, I am taking a vacation from making it look easy. Now it's your turn.

10 April 2008

Did that get your attention? Can you remember the last time you saw a chef owner on their own line? Oh I'm sure there are hundreds of thousands of restaurants everywhere where this is the case. But in my own 15 year career it's been rare.

I don't think it's where the chef should be all the time-- it neither makes sense for her to be on the line every night nor him to never be on the line, but it's a powerful sight to see the chef step on the line and blow everyone out of the water.

Let me tell you a story.

Many years ago I was the pastry sous chef at The French Laundry. That kitchen is insanely small. It's a little bigger now, and of course now it's part of an empire, but because the building is land marked there's not much else Thomas can do to expand what space exists. There are 3 lines and off to the side of pastry is where the cheese person stands.

The lines are like this: every station has a partner station. Fish & Amuse, Garde Manger/First Course & Meat, Cheese & Pastry. If you can count, this means that there are really only 6 people who can say they've cooked at The French Laundry. Everyone else is support staff-- and there are about 40 of those.

The year I was there (you can cross reference my resume here), an amazing person and cook named Eric Ziebold was the chef de cuisine. He was TFL's first ever sous chef and to this day I have never seen any one person work so many hours. (He, Thomas & Laura all put in 17-19 hour days, 7 days a week.) Everyone knows The French Laundry is an amazing restaurant, but few know why. It's easy to blame or praise one person, but the truth is that it takes a village.

Eric has a very interesting temperament. Read between the lines and you will see what I mean. His famous line was, "I'm an equal opportunity asshole." Or he would sidle up next to you real close and say, quietly, "Oh, is that how you do _______? Here at The French Laundry we do it like this," and then he'd gracefully move you aside and show you. It was with Eric's constant feedback that I learned how to and how not to manage. He reminded me that I had to do what felt right for me-- what was going to let me sleep at night?

do I sound like I was in love?

One day Eric did something amazing. He was frustrated at how things were going on the hot lines. Eric was not a screamer, but he could be direct in a way that made you stop dead in your under-the-breath mumblings, shape the fuck up, focus and do it right. Thomas's approach was more like Chinese water torture-- he would repeat the same sentence over and over until he had what he wanted in front of him. Something like this:

"I need an agnolotti. I need an agnolotti. I need an agnolotti. I need an agnolotti. I need an agnolotti. I need an agnolotti. I need an agnolotti. I need an agnolotti. I need an agnolotti. I need an agnolotti. Agnolotti. Agnolotti. Agnolotti. Agnolotti. Agnolotti. Agnolotti. Agnolotti. Agnolotti."

You get the point.

So this night Eric was watching the line. At the time the kitchen was trying on a new expediting model that they later employed full time when there were more sous chefs: Thomas stood at the pass and Eric helped anyone on the line who was crashing hard or getting overwhelmed.

But Eric was pacing. Trying to understand why service was going so poorly. You have to understand this: there was no "talking" at TFL. It was a "call & response" kitchen. (Yes, much like the military.) Few sentences were uttered by anyone other than Thomas, and his were quite succinct as I've pointed out. Any response from us underlings that was not, "Oui Chef, or Yes Chef" had to mean something. If anyone could be prepped for that kind of job from another career it might be the people who write newspaper headlines, or surgeons and ER professionals.

Finally Eric says something that makes us all look up from our minute, detail oriented tasks. "You heard me, get off the line, all of you, I'm going to show you how to cook."

In my first 6 weeks at The French Laundry I saw a number of people get fired. Oftentimes right in the middle of service. It would go something like this:

TK: "What? What did you say? Excuse me?

Bye. Yes, leave, you're done. Yes, bye."

And a few times I saw him walk up to the sorry cook and, is his 6 foot + many-inches-of-adamantness-you don't-want-to-fuck-with way really make sure the cook stopped cooking. he wasn't physically violent-- he didn't need to be, his look and words were enough.

So when Eric asked the line to step away from their stations they all thought they were getting fired. it was quite a sight.

"No." Eric said to calm them a bit, "Stand over here, I'm going to show you how to put out this table, I'm going to show you how to cook, how to work like a team, how to put out just one ticket."

And then he did. He cooked every single course, by himself, with not another soul on the line touching sauce pots or spatulas or garnishes. He jumped this way and that, gracefully, using every part of his body, talking, admonishing, telling, teaching, showing, explaining as he went.

It was the most amazing thing I ever saw in a kitchen.

Eric took over the entire kitchen and cooked all those cooks under the fucking table. We were in awe and I have tears in my eyes and can't type fast enough to tell you this story now, more than 10 years later.

When the line resumed their positions, every single cook knew just who they were. Cooks.

You know why Eric was the very first sous chef of TFL? Because Thomas told all his line cooks the same thing on the same day. Line cooks who had been with him for years and others who had only just arrived.

"I am going to promote one person to sous. It's going to be the person who is already acting like the sous chef."

When Thomas made the announcement, half of his line walked out.

My industry will tell you life is black and white. It will whisper you dark nothings in the middle of the night. People have these words tattooed on their bodies. Everyone has scars that show and we all have scars that are invisible. 'This? This mark is from when I shaved off my pinkie on the mandolin but had to keep working because someone else had called in sick that day.'

But there's a lot of gray area too. Too much, if you ask me. These days I'm starting to think people should take a test before they open a restaurant.

It will be like a triathlon: you must work the line, well, if not stellar. You must understand and be able to explain one P&L statement. You must understand why raw fish and cooked meat cannot share the same bin in the walk-in. You must understand how to make cookies, one dessert with chocolate that's not a molten chocolate cake and it would be great if you knew the difference between panna cotta and creme brulee. The test would list a series of questions and you would be graded on how much responsibility you took for your own actions or the actions of those you hired. For bonus points you might have to research why all the restaurants in your location before yours failed, or cooking in and creating a menu for a kitchen with no Latinos (or your State/ Country picks for easy-to-exploit-able peoples.)

You get the drift. You? You're smart, right-- you understand that opening a restaurant means hours upon hours, days upon days, and years toppled on years ahead of you where these things will not be possible:

sleeping late, resting without a care in the world, taking on-the-fly vacations, turning off your cell phone, remaining oblivious to state, local and Federal labor laws, continuing to be absent or uncommunicative to your staff and diners, resting on your laurels or continuing to blame everyone else for your failures and weaknesses.

Opening A Restaurant is like stepping into an X-Ray machine. Are you ready? Wearing the right underwear? Did you floss the night before? Go on, buy those Altoids-- they'll fool a few people into thinking you haven't been drinking that morning.

I'm all fired up. Because it's been a long time since I worked with a chef who knew how to cook. On the line, where a chef has to spend some time, even if they don't for 45 years like our heroes.

I'm trying to get to the bottom of something: there are these "chefs" who say they're chefs because that word, that little innocuous word, means something to them that it doesn't mean to me.

Being a chef is hard work. Opening a restaurant is harder. If it's fame you're after there are easier professions to get there. Or just pull a few stunts: America loves people who are brave enough to do stupid shit.

My questions are these:

If you don't LOVE food, like head-over-heels-I-can't-see-that-you're-an-axe-murderer-love, why are you cooking? Wouldn't you rather have a 40 hour week with benefits and work in a bank?

If you don't want to taste and smell and eat and learn about every fruit and chocolate and nut and fat, then why are you pursuing a pastry career path?

If you don't want to cook and clean and solve problems and figure out new, more efficient ways of doing things and feed people you've never met and learn from everyone you've hired and challenge yourself mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually and financially:

/There are no shotgun restaurant openings. Restaurants don't break
condoms and there are no rabbit tests for persons knocked up with a
restaurant.

Restaurants aren't opened in black outs and you can never ever use
the excuse, "I didn't know what I was doing, I was drunk when I opened
that restaurant."/

I'll leave you with this crazy thought: What if there were less restaurants in San Francisco & the Bay Area? What if these fewer restaurants hired all the cooks and exchanged them when someone wanted to learn something else, something new? What if less of these restaurants were cookie cut-outs of other long time Bay Area restaurants, and we had more kinds of cuisines and techniques employed and that way diners would be happier and so would so many of the local cooks who are leaving for other, more competitive cities because so many of the kitchens here do exactly the same formula, even if it's great? What if all these restaurants could thrive because there was just a little less competition? The cream rises to the top, right?

There are no workers because everyone wants to be the boss. Or they want to feel like the boss. Or be called the boss.

Not me, I don't want to wear a title I polish everyday, like an obsessive antique car refurbisher. I like my fitted jacket, yes, but I work in it. I don't own my own place because I know what goes along with it. I don't want to be a single parent.

Words mean nothing without elbow grease. Show me a chef who knows how to cook, how to lead, how to delegate, how to be humble and proud (not either/ or), how to keep a restaurant afloat financially, how to make delicious food, how to know when it's time to say, "Hey I need help, I need suggestions or I need this now!" and I will show you my loyalty. I will respect you and return the favor by not cutting corners, by keeping my workplace clean and organized, tasting my food and accepting criticism, costing out my plates, treating the equipment like it's not disposable, delegating, admitting when I'm at fault, and by being humble enough to say when I can't or don't understand how to do something.

-----

This post is dedicated to the chefs who inspired it: TH, ML, TK, EZ, SB, MLH, JC, GS, JB, DK, PC, CF, HH, all of whom I have had the honor to work with and for, and some of whom I continue to know. And DC, whom I have never met, but whose words brought me both to tears and many hand gesturing exclamation points recently.

14 March 2008

The thing is this: I'm sure you'll know eventually, the Bay Area is
a small town, but I'm worried since my last relationship created some
fairly mean comments about me and that restaurant (to me directly and on Eater SF)
because the departure was so sudden and murky (remember that the only 3 people who know the facts are those who sat in that room that day, and I'm one of them.) While I agree everyone has a right to their opinions about me, my desserts, who I am professionally, both pro
and con or indifferent, I don't want people to hate or love this new
place based solely on me and my concoctions being there. I am not this
place; not a parent or even a live-in nanny, just a baby sitter. I am
not waking up at 2 and four am to feed this restaurant baby, no.

[Also I have this nagging question. Should a restaurant who hires a
consultant be allowed to use said person's name even if that consultant
isn't there day and night like the rest of the crew? I asked this
question directly to another pastry chef consultant recently and she
said she left it up to the client.]

What do you think? Is it false advertising? How much does it matter if I say the name of my new gig(s) on eggbeater? Can you be OK with the fact that I am a roving pastry chef or does my identity have to be defined by the One name above my name on my white jacket?

For the record: I never told anyone not to continue to frequent my
last place of employment. I never lied about any of the details concerning my departure. I stated a fact, a fact that was told to me on the last day I baked in that kitchen.

I never said I loved all my desserts equally and
I never said I, or my plates, was the greatest anything. I never talked smack about those I worked with and for at my last job. I didn't play the blame game and say it was all about them and I was innocent.

Eggbeater is written by me, Shuna, so of course I can only bring you my side. I can only tell you what I heard, show you what I saw, explain what I knew and now know. Tell you how I feel. All relationships, and divorces, are complicated affairs. Sure I'm angry, confused, saddened, feel betrayed-- I'm not a rock without a heart. I poured all of me into that place for 6 months, and I was willing to see it make at least a one year anniversary. Breakups are hard but I'm neither a pile of tears in a dark room, nor am I lobotomized Klonopin-infused pollyanna with not an ounce of resentment in my almost 40 year old body. I'm hurt, I'm angry, and yes, I'll get through it and then one day I'll be "over it" and have a lot more perspective and be grateful they cut me when they did. (ps bloggers & chefs are human too.)

I use eggbeater to process, to figure out, to make sense on the seemingly nonsensical. I know this scares a lot of people-- my own rawness, my ability to write about this industry with passionate love, despondent sadness, critical thinking and hyper happiness. I bring you a voice from the inside and it's not always pretty or easily digestible. You can continue to hate me because you don't think my desserts are anything to speak of let alone blog about. You can hate me because I'm too loud, too sensitive, too strong, too in-your-face, too conceited, too passionate, too humble, too mean, too emotional, too whiny, too skinny, too militant, too ______________ fill in the blank. You can also choose to refrain from reading eggbeater.

I'm attempting to write my industry down. It's not stagnant, it's not still, it's not one thing. It's big, complicated and amazing. If I don't write it down, sketch it as it moves across the page, you might believe TV and there might be a continued trend to ignore the whos making our food we're supposedly so concerned about.

It's complicated, I realize this. And with complexity comes fear and misunderstanding and tears and annoyances both small and grand. In every story, characters, and every character has a version.

So, again, my question to you is this:

How much does it matter if I say the name of my new gig(s) on eggbeater? What are, in your opinion, the pros and cons of such a declaration?

As you can see, I am moderating comments these days. Feel free to comment anonymously. I will accept all opinions, all ideas, all possibilities except those meant to attack, or imply attack--- me or anyone else.

For some comparison:

A few other professional cook written blogs-- some of which choose to be anonymous about themselves, their places of employment, their names and locations, some have no "restaurant home" at all, some tell us everything, some who only let you pull the curtain aside with one hand ~

12 March 2008

Every few minutes a restaurant is born. Or at least thought about being born. Actually I have no idea how many restaurants are born in any given hour on earth, but it's safe to safe to say that no one opened a restaurant by accident. There are no shotgun restaurant openings. Restaurants don't break condoms and there are no rabbit tests for persons knocked up with a restaurant.

Restaurants aren't opened in black outs and you can never ever use the excuse, "I didn't know what I was doing, I was drunk when I opened that restaurant."

As a friend of mine would say, "You have to mean it."

And yet when will restaurants stop? They proliferate like salmon. When will too many be enough? When will an average city block, mall, a suburban strip-mall, be too heavy laden with joints and shops and dives and white-tablecloths and chains and drive-thrus and marts and bars and buffets and shacks and counters and everything underground and above-ground and high in the clouds and deep in the snow? I mean really. Come on now.

But a restaurant is a dream for so many people. They want to make a baby restaurant and watch the people shape it. They want to serve their food to the masses. If it takes a village for a child, it takes a population for a restaurant. My last chef used to say over and over that there were only 750,000 people in San Francisco. And look how many restaurant babies go to heaven before they're walking there! Too many to count, too many to mourn.

That said, I have begun a new project.

Don't fall off your chair. It's neither my new love nor a rebound relationship. (I've never been good at rebounds. My heart's too big, it weighs down both sleeves. I remain deeply in love with people for ages after they've evaporated.)

This time I am keeping some distance. I am not co-parenting. I am not moving in. I am not donating sperm, or an egg. I am not giving a kidney or blood.

This time I am a consultant.

What on earth does that mean?

Consulting is like a drug dealer saying they're in the import business. Or an Ivy League graduate saying they went to a small school in Massachusetts. It's vague. Open-ended.

Consulting is more like being a traveling call girl, or an IT person who makes house calls. I bring my skills, a bag of tricks, some fantastic advice, a box of tissues, a short flogger or a cane-- depending, my get-down-to-work hat, and, as is the case with me particularly, some good grid paper and waterproof pens.

In my bag of tricks are:

a number of kinds of menus, innumerable dessert ideas, recipes that work, seasonal knowledge, price-point understanding, a special calculator that figures out dessert sales percentages,

an invisible tool for measuring fear/ acceptance/ bewilderment/ delight etc. from various sorts of owners, an extra pair of underwear, references, all-natural drugs that make me

malleable, a proven track record-- folded into something that takes up no room in a wallet, a big pocket of gold tinted self-worth, a lot of phone numbers in my not-so-little-black-book, some very strong tea,

more than enough smiles and "don't worries," "it'll be alrights," "of course I can do thats," and just to be safe, a handful of "fuck yeahs!"

at the bottom of my bag like loose change, plenty of water, little blue pills that allow me to eat air and become satiated, and that's just the carry on.

Being a consultant means being anything and everything, or nothing, for the client.

Of course there's work I won't do. (In fact I have a genetic ailment that keeps me from doing jobs I hate/ don't believe in/ disrespect/ or just plain think are un-delicious.) But for the most part if I can be baking, making elegant plates, and feeding a few unsuspecting people something other than molten chocolate cakes, artificially flavored butterscotch puddings, mediocre creme brulee and stale cookie plates, I'm happy. Keep Them On Their Toes, that's what I say!

Consulting is an amazing challenge because every house is different, in scale and breadth and just plain equipment vs. seats vs. square footage! It's a way to create lovely desserts for people who may not have the time or the skill to make them themselves. It's an involved process that includes training, teaching, listening. Applying the golden rule, "An Ability To Go With The Flow," is of utmost importance.

Until people walk through the door, sit down, read the menu, order, eat, drink and pay up, none of us have any idea who that restaurant child will grow up to be. We put out a lot of fires, rearrange our arrangements, make decisions and then cross them out, every day a thousand times and then some.